Course setters thoughts

Now it’s getting close to the competition and all control points are built. We course setters have spent the past few weeks double-checking all control points so we are satisfied with their placement and setups. There are a total of 174 controls in the forest, so it’s been quite a bit of work. The control setups consist of wooden poles with wooden plates and a holder for SI units. The week before the competition, flags and reflectors will be set up.

In the forest, visibility and accessibility are still good. The budding of leaves has just begun, and the undergrowth hasn’t grown high. There have been a few days of rainfall in April, but this type of terrain seems to handle it well.

Something we’ve noticed while out in the competition area is that the wild boar population has grown. There are many areas where the ground has been rooted up, and many paths have been trodden down.

Unfortunately, the forest has been affected by attacks from the bark beetle in several areas. Because of this, there have been clearings of spruce in some areas, and in other places where the dead spruces have been left in the forest, they have now started to fall to some extent after a windy April. As they have fallen in the past few weeks, it hasn’t been possible to include this on the competition map. This means slightly limited accessibility in some smaller areas that aren’t shown on the map, but they should, in most cases, be easy to avoid.

What we can say is that it’s a beautiful and challenging competition area.

Welcome!

The course setting team